


the vision of gas lamps as angels

by intimatopia



Category: Promare (2019)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Integrated Burnish (Promare), Hearing Voices, Lio Fotia Is A Mess, M/M, Masochism, Past Abuse, Polyamory, Recovery, Self-Esteem Issues, Tattoos, attempted self-harm, going to therapy, the thin line between disability and superpower
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-15
Updated: 2020-04-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:27:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 18,035
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23663116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/intimatopia/pseuds/intimatopia
Summary: Lio Fotia is twenty-five and washed out when he moves to Promepolis. He thinks he's found all there is to his life.Then his medicines stop working.
Relationships: Lio Fotia/Gueira/Meis
Comments: 18
Kudos: 101





	the vision of gas lamps as angels

**Author's Note:**

> title from [monet refuses the operation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/52577/monet-refuses-the-operation-56d231289e6db) \- it doesn't actually have anything to do with this fic but it KIND OF DOES and also it MAKES ME HAPPY which is of course very important.
> 
> a huge thanks to: jade, for betaing and sensitivity reading; mac for pacing edits; ozy, [cal](https://uucest.tumblr.com), [kienan](https://twitter.com/elsendor), and [chaos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/angstychaosmagicuser) from our server for also sensitivity reading. also to my sometimes co-writer vic for putting up with my hyperfocus-fueled writing binges (16k of this was written in 4 days) and also for everything else she does. the way lio's fire responds to affection comes from [this lovely headcanon by vivi]() which they graciously let me use <3 also thank you to everyone who read this fic before i posted it!! i love you guys!! gosh i love so many people
> 
> this fic was originally posted under the title "it rained spring all night" and then i got skeeved out by 1. posting in chapters 2. the multiple pacing errors and deleted it. now it's back! woo!

Lio came home tired.

The routine ticked inside him, mechanically performing task after task. Meds, water, putting dinner in the microwave, sitting down on the couch and yanking himself awake from a doze—that wasn’t part of the plan—changing his clothes, cleaning up the mess he’d left behind this morning. Falling asleep between two bites of reheated pizza.

He woke up again at two am and stared out of the window at the ant-sized trail of cars on the street below. Maybe moving to Promepolis had been a bad idea. Maybe uprooting his life and crashing through everything he’d worked for in order to chase some fragile spectre of happiness halfway across the country had been a bad idea. He’d had this realization before, he was sure, but it was easier to fall into maudlin self-hatred when it was dark and his fire was far away.

 _Was_ it far away? He couldn’t hear voices right now, so it probably was. Not for the first time, Lio regretted having ever been put on suppressants, even if it was the only way for a Burnish as powerful as him to survive unleashed. Promare was dangerous. All the more so for an omega-class Burnish like him.

He knew this. The suppressants made him safe for people to be around.

They also made him lonely and cold, difficult and distant. No wonder his last two relationships had fallen right apart. It was hard enough to love someone who heard voices, harder still to love someone who missed them. The weight of them pressing down on him was so constant he'd gotten used to it, but he couldn’t get used to the way he felt powerless and inert and _dead._

Maybe he’d get a tattoo tomorrow. As coping mechanisms went, it was one of the better ones. He already had neon flames licking at his arms. Maybe he could get a dragon next. It wasn’t like he lacked the money, really, only worked so hard because he needed to do something to keep himself from falling apart during the day.

The thought of a tattoo bolstered him. He finished his pizza while sketching a design—a dragon, something to wind from his thighs up his stomach and back with the head across his shoulder blades.

Something that would hurt _viciously_ to get. He smiled to himself, always a little more of a junkie for pain than was good for him.

This time he got to bed before he fell asleep.

—/—

Of all the things Lio thought he’d do with a law degree, working at an agency that helped Burnish civilians access reparations and benefits wasn’t it. His parents had thought he’d become a classy lawyer like them, make partner in less than a decade. Instead they’d been saddled with a mad boy who barely made it through college in one piece. Quite the disappointment. So here he was now at twenty-five, talking to people all day and walking them through the tangles of bureaucracy that stood between the average person and any help they needed.

His supervisor was a mundane who disapproved of his request to leave early, but granted it without much fuss when Lio promised to work overtime another day.

Lio had done his research that morning over breakfast (well, a mug of coffee) locating a tattoo parlour an hour from where he lived and half an hour from where he worked that was run by a Burnish and his partner.

It was a nice enough place, nondescript on the outside except for the plants hanging from the awning. He rapped on the door, sliding his free hand into his pocket to finger the design.

They had a contact number listed, but they also said they’d prefer if people came by to scope out their work before making any commitments. And though it was far from his place, Lio liked commuting through Promepolis.

The door was opened by a tall, slender man with blue-black hair. “Hi,” he said. “Can I help you?”

Lio ran through four possible responses in his head on autopilot, mind knocked off-track by the kanji on the man’s left shoulder. “Tattoos,” he ended up blurting you. “You do—them. Tattoos. Yes?”

God, he sounded so _rude_. But the guy smiled. “Sure we do. Can we get you one?”

He made it sound like something more than it was. Something about the quality of his voice gave everything a touch of innuendo. Lio’s cheeks were hot. “Just an appointment,” he said, still tripping over his words. “I’m Lio Fotia.”

The guy gestured him in. “I’m Meis,” he said perfunctorily. “And that,” he pointed to a corner, where a guy was busily playing on a DS “is Gueira, he does all the work around here.”

As a teenager, Lio had harboured a misplaced dream of becoming a tattoo artist. He’d even learnt to draw for it. But of course it didn’t go anywhere. Graduating early, and law school, and everything after that. He swallowed the thorn in his throat and said, “Pleased to meet you.”

“Yeah,” Gueira said distractedly. He was tall even stooped over, broader shoulders than Meis and flaming red hair.

Meis laughed. “Right this way.”

Lio was led into a small, brightly lit room. Claustrophobia hit him like a ton of bricks and he shook his head through it, wiggling his hand in his pocket and bouncing on his feet to lose the feeling of being trapped.

So many hang-ups. Such a mess. He breathed in and out, twice and twice again.

Meis had sat himself on a spinning chair, holding a sketchpad in hand. “Do you have any ideas for what you want?”

“I have a design,” Lio answered. His voice was scratchy. He cleared his throat and pulled the paper from his pocket, handing it to Meis. His hands were sweaty. He snatched them quickly back, didn’t dare to touch another person.

Meis hummed, looking it over. Lio sat down on the loveseat, the only other place in the room one could sit. Forcibly relaxed his now unoccupied hands.

“This is really good,” Meis said after a moment. Lio suppressed a sarcastic retort. “But it’s going to be big and complicated and painful. Have you gotten any tattoos before?”

Lio bit back even more sarcasm in favour of unbuttoning his sleeve to display the flames licking up his wrist. They reached from the base of his hands to his shoulders, pink and green and orange, like Promare. Like the Burnish had, the ones that weren’t him and didn’t have to dose up to prevent them from going on a mad rampage

Someday, Lio thought desperately, he’d get tired of being bitter and angry. Someday he’d accept his situation and his limitations and achieve happiness. Wasn’t that what was supposed to happen?

“Shit,” Meis was saying. “Those are good.” He wolf-whistled lightly, examining the patterns. “You’re Burnish?”

“Yeah,” Lio mumbled. _Barely._

“Cool,” Meis grinned. “Me too, dude.” He lit a small flame between two fingers, violent and pink.

Lio looked away. Cleared his throat. “I’ve gotten tattoos before,” he said redundantly, just to say something. The flame went out. “I think this might take more than a few sessions, with the colors and the complexity.”

“Definitely,” Meis said, half a beat off. “We’re all booked out this week, but we can fit you in after that. And you might wanna get those,” he nodded at Lio’s arms, still uncovered “touched up again. We can do that too, if you like.”

They _did_ need retouching. He’d gotten them almost seven years ago now. “When can I come?”

“Depends on how much you can stand in one session,” Meis noted dryly.

Lio took a deep breath. “How much would you _let_ me do in one session?”

Meis gave him a sharp look with his uncovered eye. Lio met it stubbornly. Meis probably wasn’t unfamiliar with junkies like him, in this line of work, and he had no right to look so judgemental about it. Lio wasn’t _that_ weird. “Three hours, max,” Meis said finally. “Gueira can’t sit still for longer than that. And for that dragon, four sessions.”

Twelve hours would keep Lio level-headed for six months, if that. He was going to run out of _skin_ before he was thirty, for fuck’s sake. But he nodded. “That’s okay.”

They hammered out rates before Lio left, too lightheaded with even the prospect of relief to care about how long he had to commute. To care about the tremor in his hands that meant he’d gone too long without a dose of his meds, the cold ache in his stomach where he had skipped lunch.

He fingered the lines under his sleeve on the subway, heat shifting and singing under his skin. Calling to him. He shuddered, trying to ignore it. Them.

When he’d first been put on suppressants, he’d tried to stretch how long he went between doses, because he hated how passive they made him. Made it as far as a day between each pill. But that just made losing the company of the voices eventually worse. Having to hear their thin cries as they faded away.

And he kept getting caught staring into space, or burning his things with a lighter, because everything in him called out for fire and he couldn’t not obey.

Some fires were accidents. He had a tendency to do things before realizing he was doing them. He’d lost his plane tickets home like that one Christmas, a letter of recommendation for a postgrad degree (he’d been too ashamed to ask for a replacement; there went that path), and two copies of his third year law textbook ( _in the event of a fire the rational citizen assumes responsibility with those who have both the reason and ability to burn—_ ) Other fires were deliberate: the desire to burn _himself_ was an old one and wound into his bones. Sometimes he held a flame to his bruises just for the static sweetness of pain and delight mixing together in his brain until he felt alive. Kray had hated the habit, hated the idea of smoke and lighters. A one-man crusade against fire to rival Galo.

Now all of Lio’s fire was static, preserved on his skin in ink. He hadn’t lit a match in years. He’d been _good,_ the model of a reformed pyromaniac. It was never going to be worth it, he knew, no matter what he wished or what he did. It was never going to compare to the joy of his own fire.

Even thinking that, a symptom of his exhausted lost anger, made his stomach turn with unease. Burnish weren't all dangerous, but he certainly was. Why did he keep asking for things he _knew_ he shouldn't have?

—/—

Work was work and proceeded how it normally did, which meant that the maddening itch under Lio’s skin only grew and grew. Without fire or pain or alcohol to anchor him to his body, he floated through his days, moving on autopilot and barely remembering to drink water and eat food. At night he lay awake and reached for Promare over and over until his mind felt raw and his eyes ached with holding back tears. It was always far away now.

Sometimes he clutched the sheets and jerked himself off instead, though that rarely helped. He had never considered sex a sufficient substitute for burning, and certainly not sex that only involved his own hand.

He hadn’t held a knife against himself since the incident that got him medicated in the first place, probably never would again, but he considered it. Not for the first time either, and not as seriously as he sometimes had in the past. Idle thoughts between the hours, another manifestation of the want that plagued him.

Instead he fingered the flames and stared at the appointment on the calendar on his phone. Saturday afternoon, three hours.

He could wait that long. He had to.

—/—

Saturday dawned rainy and Lio’s mood soured at once. He hated the rain. But he dragged himself into the awful pouring wetness to buy a pack of cigarettes. He hadn’t kept them around since his boyfriend in law school had insisted he break the habit, but he still smoked sometimes.

Especially when it rained.

Guilt made sure he smoked on the balcony, shivering with wind and dampness. Then he got dressed to leave, a soft t-shirt and shorts. Ate something, because he’d been sent home to eat before a tattoo more than once and had no desire to repeat the experience when the distance was so long.

He’d intended to walk to the parlour, having never minded a long trawl through a city, but the rain pushed him inside a cab.

Lio fiddled with his phone as they drove. Thought about texting his parents, though they rarely appreciated updates on his life now that it was out of their hands. Who else remained? Galo, perhaps, well into firefighter training and constantly exhausted by it. Not Kray for sure. Lio shuddered at the very thought. He didn’t want to dredge up memories of law school more than he needed to, or memories of Kray.

But he couldn’t stop thinking about it once he started. How he hadn’t hated rain as much as he did now before he spent one too many nights standing out in it waiting for Kray to open the fucking door to him. Always cruel, always in the strangest ways.

He’d deleted the contact years ago, so it wasn’t even a relevant possibility. He dug his nails into his forearm and thought about fire instead, brought warmth to his skin so he wouldn’t feel the rain between the cab and the parlour’s door.

The door opened at once when he knocked. “Told ya he wouldn’t cancel,” Meis yelled back inside. “Come on in, dude, we were about to go home.”

“Am I late?” Lio asked, suddenly nervous. He was almost sure he wasn’t, but checked the time anyway. 

“Nope.” Meis popped the p annoyingly. “We just fucking hate the rain. We were gonna hole up at home with, uh, Netflix.” He squinted down at Lio. “How old are you?”

Lio gave him a flat, unimpressed look. “Twenty-five. You guys are dating?”

“Married,” Meis said cheerfully. He held up a hand, counting on it. “Ten years in three months.”

“Wow,” Lio returned dryly. “Why would you think I’d cancel?”

“Most Burnish don’t go out in this weather,” Meis shrugged. “Come on inside. You wanna dry yourself up?”

 _Most Burnish._ The words stung with how distant their reality was from Lio’s. He wasn’t most Burnish. He wasn’t even close. The first time in his life he’d met another like him he’d been in college and it had been awful on every count. 

“I can’t,” Lio stuttered out, trotting after Meis. “Dry myself.” He desperately hoped Meis would understand, or at least wouldn’t ask questions.

“I’ll give you a towel,” Meis replied easily, gesturing him through a doorway to a larger room that was presumably where actual work happened, because it looked exactly as comfortable and worn out as Lio’s favorite parlours always had. He relaxed the minute he stepped inside, forgetting the cold for a second. Gueira had already set everything up, and grinned at Lio when he came in.

“Hi,” Lio said breathlessly.

“Hey,” Gueira said. “This is gonna hurt like a bitch, I’m gonna be real.”

“I’m aware,” Lio said, and didn’t say _that’s the point._

“As long as we’re on the same page,” Gueira replied cheerfully. “Anyway, I moved your design around a bit. We can go back to your version if you like it better, I just wanted to see if I could make it fit.”

Gueira’s version would put the entire dragon on his back, with the tail curling into a neat point at the base of Lio’s spine. Lio weighed the pros (more free space leftover for other tattoos) and cons (he’d _wanted_ that design to be huge) in his head for a couple minutes before nodding. “Do you have to outline first?”

“Yes,” Gueira said firmly. “I can make it light so it fades out and just leaves behind colour, if you want it like that.”

“Preferably.” Lio slipped out of the t-shirt, folding it carefully and lying down on the table. It was cold against his stomach and he tensed, remembering that he hated putting his back to other people.

“Easy there,” Gueira murmured. “Would it help if I talked you through it?”

He probably thought Lio was scared of the needle itself, which was so far off the mark Lio wanted to cry. The needle was the least of his worries. “No,” he answered. “Just get to it.” He relaxed himself by sheer force of will.

It was always a little hellish at first, pain so sharp his teeth hurt. He’d been used to it, once, but no longer. Maybe three hours would be too much—but he forced that thought down, counted his breaths. In and out, steady and slow. A fire in his heart no one could put out, a fire that needed to be fed. Pain fed that fire. Ink and needles fed the part of Lio that wanted to claim his skin, a map being drawn over uncharted territory. It wasn’t his until he’d painted it over. It wasn’t _known_ until he knew how it hurt.

Lio’s awareness sank out of his mind into his body like sediment settling, following the pinprick red of the needle in his skin. He relaxed in increments, knew the shape of fire in the hands that touched him and knew he was alright as long as the pain continued.

“Dude’s a junkie,” a voice above him said. It seemed to be coming through miles of water. Lio tried to lift his head and was forced down again by a hand on his neck. “Fuckin’ _wiped_.”

“We get them once a month, are you surprised?” another voice said, sounding amused. “Hey, Lio. Lio.”

“Hey,” Lio slurred out, because that was probably for him. “What’s going on?”

“You’re done for the day,” the voice said. “It isn’t raining anymore. Are you going to get home alright? You’re pretty wiped.”

Lio hadn’t processed any of that. He just about managed to sit up, head spinning with dizzy sweet light. His entire back throbbed in a decidedly delightful manner. He giggled, high on endorphins and the relief of having something to cling to again, and found a bottle of water pushed into his hands.

Water was good. Cool and nice. He drank almost the whole thing. “Is there a bathroom?”

“That way,” Meis said. Lio trotted through the door and did his business, strangely tired and not tired at the same time. Sex and pain both got him like this, all joy and nowhere to put it down. Too heavy to carry without fucking himself up. That was why he’d had to be put on the meds in the first place.

Even thinking about medicines and his lost fire couldn’t dent his happiness as he washed his hands. Gueira had already bandaged up his back, and he’d have to take care of it when he went home, but that was all. So much goodness to keep him sane for a long while now.

“Are you sure you’ll get home alright?” Gueira said, sounding worried, as Lio forked the cash over to Meis. “You look like you’re about to fall over.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lio replied, too exhausted to bristle properly. “It’s just an hour and a half away, but I can take a cab.”

“Just,” Meis muttered, counting the money and pocketing it.

Lio’s head hurt, and suddenly he felt so deeply and overwhelmingly upset that his hands twitched with lost fire. “I used to live in America,” he said frigidly. “You gotta get used to driving around a lot.”

Meis shrugged. “As long as you’re sure,” he said, seemingly indifferent, and Lio subsided again. He had no right to be as touchy as he felt right now, he reminded himself. Meis wasn’t out to hurt him.

That sounded fake, even in his head.

Gueira walked him out, while Meis closed shop. “Next week, same time?” he asked, as Lio called for a cab.

“Yeah,” Lio muttered. “Also, uh, sorry. I was pretty out of it back there.”

“Happens to the best of us,” Gueira said sympathetically, patting his shoulder. Lio flinched a little, and then decided not to do that anymore. “You focus on getting home, and eat something when you get there. You’re skinny as fuck and you’re gonna crash hard, and you want some sugar in you before that happens.” He pulled a chocolate bar out of his pocket as he said it, handing it to Lio, who accepted it with numb shock. “Nevermind Meis back there, he gets tetchy when he worries.”

“Thanks,” Lio said dumbly. Gueira patted him again.

His cab was there soon, thankfully. He waved tentatively to Gueira as he got in, still parsing the sudden kindness he’d received. The implication that he was being worried about by near-strangers.

He hunched on the seat, unable to lean back, and nibbled on the chocolate.

Throbbing pain settled his mind somewhat, and when that faded there was the knowledge that he was getting a tattoo he’d wanted since he was a child.

—/—

At work, he helped two Burnish siblings reunite with the family they’d been taken from as children. Two decades back, that had been the norm for Burnish children—taking them from their families and resettling them in foster homes that would provide them with inadequate but government-sanctioned care. Was it any wonder his people were so fractured? Lio had only barely escaped that fate himself. He hadn’t manifested until he was almost a teenager, by which that forced rehoming had been declared inhumane.

He found himself wondering if something similar had happened to Meis and Gueira, the only Burnish he’d spoken to face-to-face since moving to Promepolis.

Lio didn’t like meeting other Burnish. Most of them were unmedicated, because the medications were too expensive for the government to want to spend them on people who were largely only living their lives. In this, at least, corruption triumphed over systematically ruining people’s lives. And Lio—Lio hadn’t spent more than a couple days off his medicines since he was seventeen. There was little he had in common with the average Burnish. 

Well, there had been Kray, but Kray had _liked_ being medicated. He claimed they were necessary, the moral choice for Burnish of their calibre. He was hardly average. Lio had accepted this as true, if only because he’d been nineteen and touch starved and Kray wouldn’t flinch from his skin. He’d have accepted anything.

A hand around his throat, broken bones, more bruises than he could keep track of after a month or two. Lio had hated the pain and hated it more for being so close to what he wanted and yet always so far. Two years of that, before Kray Foresight shifted majors and universities and they lost sight of each other. Hopefully forever. Kray had only needed him as a convenient toy and Lio had fulfilled that need with the dull recklessness of someone who didn’t care whether he lived or died.

Kray had decided Lio was a weakness he couldn’t afford six months before he moved. And then they’d fucked every weekend until Kray’s flight took off. _Bitterly addictive,_ Kray had called him one night.

Lio had almost gotten that tattooed on himself the day after Kray left, before deciding he was better than that. And the parlour had been closed.

 _Ten years,_ Lio thought, staring at the white surface of his desk at work. What would it have been like to have something permanent? Something that didn’t turn to ash in his hot fingers, all its goodness burnt away by Lio’s fire. He thought about Meis’s fitted tank top, his long hair, the ease with which he’d referred to Gueira. And the way fire had looked on his hands. _You’re Burnish?_

Lio’s head hurt. He couldn’t remember _not_ being lonely. For as far back as his memory stretched, he’d been hollow. A lamp waiting to be lit. These days, he couldn’t even imagine it.

—/—

He took care of the tattoo. He’d long since trashed the wrapper from the chocolate Gueira had given him, but he’d bought more at the supermarket. Ate them at his desk and didn’t think about what he was reaching for, the illusion of a person near him.

 _Pathetic,_ he reminded himself. He was pathetic. A washed up junkie with ash in his future. He could cling to scraps, but he’d never find a way to earn the real thing.

Saturday seemed terribly far away the longer he worked, but even the sandpaper drag of time couldn’t put a dent in Lio’s guarded excitement. He hadn’t felt like this since the last time he’d gotten a tattoo. He hadn’t felt like this since he booked his plane tickets to Promepolis.

On Friday he went clubbing. Impulsive, as most of his decisions were. Coming home and pawing through his paycheck, putting away most of the money for food and bills and staring at the balance thinking _I should do something fun._ And other people were fun, loud music and the crush of bodies and a few hours of being a pretty stranger, of being looked at with want and desire. Why shouldn’t he have that?

He kitted out in the fancy leather clothes he hadn’t worn in months. They still fit like a dream, better than his staid work clothes and so much _sexier._ Eyeliner and lip gloss and he barely recognized himself in the mirror.

This was what he’d always dress like, given the choice. Clothes that said _look at me I know what I am_ , and who cared that it wasn’t true?

Finding a dance bar in Promepolis was harder than it had to be, or at least finding one that fit Lio’s standards. He tried two before finding one he liked, closer to his place of work than was really wise. But the music hit his stomach like punch the second he stepped inside, and it was dark enough and not that crowded (it would probably get worse, considering that this kind of place only really started going after eleven and he was here right on time), and a butch girl leaning against the wall near the door messing on her phone gave him a dirty onceover before turning back to her screen, and that little hit of confidence meant he wasn’t as annoyed about being carded at the bar.

He did two shots before he felt loose and hot enough to head onto the dance floor. It hadn’t always required alcohol, but he’d grown used to carrying his body stiffly to mask the power that surged inside him. Suppressants could handle a little bit of vodka.

A beat was like pain—it could yank him inside out, soften the edge of his mind, make everything that much easier to bear. And he was a _good_ dancer.

He met the butch girl’s eyes across the bar in a rare moment of clarity, and smiled.

She took the hint easily, and he let his eyes slide half-shut as she stalked towards him. She had an inch or two over him even in the heeled shoes he was wearing, and it was always a light thrill to be looking up at someone—a thrill he didn’t allow himself anywhere else.

If dancing alone was fun, dancing with someone else was _easy._ He could make his body work with theirs. He could twist himself into a shape they wanted to hold.

He grabbed her hand and pressed it against his hip, and she took the hint, squeezing the sharp jut of it. He grinned, tilting his head back and grinding against her. “I hope you like guys,” he said, almost shouting to be heard over the music.

“I hope you like girls,” she countered, and that was that. He threw himself into it without a care after that, knowing where he was heading and waiting eagerly for the crash and burn.

And oh, it burnt alright.

—/—

“What are we doing today?” Lio asked, hanging up his jacket on the hook provided for that purpose. He’d dressed a little more sanely today, but between the high-heat arrogance that sex filled him with and the excitement of getting his tattoo, he’d given himself another day of dressing like an asshole punk. 

Gueira grinned when he saw Lio. “You’re looking fly today,” he called out from the table where he was setting up his equipment.

“ _Feeling_ fly.” Lio bounced on his feet, peering around. “Where’s your,” He waved his hand vaguely, searching for the right word. If sex made him arrogant, it also made him stupid. “Husband?”

“Off foraging for takeout,” Gueira said regretfully. “I got hungry, and my hands shake when I’m hungry. He’s just down the road, actually, his depth perception is too fucked to drive.”

“Ah,” Lio nodded. “Should we wait?”

Gueira gestured him to a chair. “Please.”

Lio straddled the chair, tilting his head at Gueira’s tools. Cartridges of ink, several needle guns, markers for skin, alcohol wipes. Nothing Lio was terribly unfamiliar with. “How did you get into this line of work?” he asked curiously.

“Well,” Gueira said, scratching his hand through his hair. “I was a bit of delinquent firebug all through school, but I always wanted to do something artistic. I had a friend who was into stick-and-poke stuff, really amateur shit. She taught me the basics and suggested I go to art school—which is where I met Meis. He doesn't actually work here, y’know; he’s got another job fixing up music equipment and he runs that out of our garage. And we live nearby. It's all pretty chill.”

Lio nodded enthusiastically along to all of this, fiddling with the lace in his sleeve. “I used to want to run a tattoo parlor,” he said, because this seemed like a conversation. “When I was a teenager, anyway.”

“Is that how you picked up sketching?” Gueira asked, perking up. “Your design was pretty cool, I hated changing it. But I figured you'd want more space left for other designs. Why’d you give it up?”

“Parents sent me to law school,” Lio shrugged. “And I didn't say no.” More like he'd been too drugged to disagree. By the time they'd reduced his dosage, it had been too late.

“Law school,” Gueira repeated, whistling. “Crazy shit.”

“So crazy,” Lio agreed, smiling despite himself. It was easy to talk to Gueira, who treated him like a real person without seeming to notice how rare that was. “S’good thing I was too doped up to give much of a shit, actually.”

Gueira’s eyes turned sharp. “Suppressants?”

Lio was saying too much, but unsaid words that had filtered inside him, forming layers of bitter water, were suddenly bubbling up. And then—“How did you know?” he asked, shifting uncomfortably. This felt like being seen through, unfamiliar and unwanted.

“Lucky guess,” Gueira answered easily. “You’re Burnish, but you don’t smell like fire.”

Lio flinched. He felt cold, cold and stupid and slow. “I didn’t know I was supposed to,” he said numbly. And he _hadn’t._ There was so much he didn’t know.

“Shit,” Gueira said sympathetically. “Sorry. You don’t know a lot of Burnish, do you?”

“Dated one in law school.” Lio felt very far from himself. “He was on suppressants, too. No one else.”

“Dude,” Gueira said. “That’s fucked up. You should come over for dinner sometime. I can’t cook, but Meis can.”

“Is it?” Lio asked, academically. “Fucked up?” He stared at his forearms. “Even if it’s always been like this?”

“Lio,” Gueira snapped. Lio jerked again, yanked into his body by his name. “ _Yes_.”

“Oh,” Lio said. He ached all the way down to his bones, but his eyes were dry. “Oh. Shit.”

Gueira muttered something too fast for Lio to catch. Lio didn’t bother asking for it, still trying to gather himself up before someone else could see him shocked and weak. Gueira got up, hesitating for a second before squeezing Lio’s shoulder and walking quickly past him. The touch made him shudder; even brief as it had been he was too raw to guard against it.

Lio wiped at his eyes, careful not to mess with the eyeliner. Counted four breaths before Meis and Gueira walked back in. “Fucking evil,” Meis was saying.

Gueira offered him egg rolls out of one of the takeout boxes, which Lio meekly accepted to nibble at when both of them frowned ferociously at him. He ended up scarfing down about four and then apologizing to Gueira for stealing his lunch, which Gueira waved off with a laugh.

“There’s not a lot to do today,” Gueira told him, when he was settled on the table. “Just the blue, and that’s the least of the colors. You should be done in about a couple hours.”

“Okay,” Lio said, closing his eyes. “I’m good, you can start.”

“Sure,” Gueira agreed, sounding amused for some reason. The first pinprick popped the bubble of building pressure in Lio’s chest, and he relaxed. He was where he wanted to be. Pain sang through him, sweet and thick and swelling with every breath in and out. Lio gave in to it, guarded by the light touch of Gueira’s fingers on his skin.

But their conversation echoed in his head, seeping into the gaps pain created. How distant Lio still was from everything that defined him—he hated knowing it, he hated knowing that someone else had seen it too.

He couldn’t not welcome a kind touch, but he could resent the cold ache in his stomach for giving him away once more.

Lio pressed his cheek to the table, and swallowed down bitterness. 

—/—

He started having nightmares again.

Most of them hardly went anywhere. Exams, running from faceless robots that towered over him and shot bullets of ice, Kray’s face staring back at him from the mirror. Some of them stuck around after he woke up, though, especially the ones full of screaming.

Screams that begged him to burn something, someone, _anyone._ Himself. He kept reading the Wikipedia article for Joan of Arc on his phone during breaks at work. He wanted to burn like that. Like saving someone, like being saved, fire licking his skin and leaving only him behind. Clean and cleansed and pure and new. He’d been _born_ to burn like that.

He was self-aware enough to recognize the delusions for what they were. He wasn’t destined to die in fire, and he certainly wasn’t anyone’s savior.

But he bought himself a lighter at the supermarket without thinking about his actions, tossing it into his cart alongside cereal and soap. At home he clicked it next to his wrist and hated the color of the resulting flames. All wrong.

He held them to his skin, and felt only a pleasant warmth. Frightened of himself, he put it away again. Booked an appointment with a psychiatrist that came well-recommended for Burnish. But that was ten days away, and in the meantime all he had was a lighter and a perfunctory instruction to continue the dosage of the suppressants he was currently on. Once every twenty-four hours like clockwork.

And still, the screaming. Sometimes he woke up with his bedsheets on fire and had to put them out again and sleep on the couch. He thought about calling Kray and asking how it was going for him, if he heard the voices too.

But Lio knew he wouldn’t. If either of them had ever been crazy, it had always been Lio.

He didn’t dare bring his fire to the skin during the day. It roared inside him, begging to be let out. He talked to people during the day and wondered if they could see that he was inches away from setting the whole city on fire. He hadn’t burnt anything willingly in so long. He had a constant low-grade fever from holding it back.

At some point during the week he received a text from an unsaved number. Meis’s, it turned out, asking if he wanted to come over for dinner on Sunday.

Lio typed _no_ four times and erased it every time. He ended up not replying at all, though the message nagged at him. He _wanted_ to. He wanted to see what they lived like—other Burnish. Burnish who weren’t crazy like him or broken like Kray. He didn’t know what he wanted but he couldn’t let himself reach for it, even when it was so close.

He drifted through the days and hours, fighting back the urge to sit down where he was and scream and scream and scream. Until his throat was raw and the voices were calm. Not gone. Calm. _Could_ they be calm?

Lio almost cancelled Saturday’s appointment. He didn’t want to face Meis and Gueira like this. Fragile and fucked up and fucking crazy. But he went anyway, and was glad he did. The first touch of the needle against his back—pink today, a whole three hours—that first sweet breaking of skin, and his brain went quiet. A door sliding shut against the noise, bringing blissful peace. The relief was almost as violent as the pain itself.

“Are you sure you don’t wanna come over for dinner tomorrow?” Gueira asked, as he bandaged Lio’s back again. 

“I’m gonna be a mess,” Lio slurred, accepting the water Gueira handed him. “You don’t want me around.” Too honest, he thought for a second, tensing painfully. But he couldn’t have said anything else. He couldn’t think that much.

“I think we can handle it,” Gueira smiled. He took the bottle back from Lio, taking a swig himself. His throat bobbed with the movement and Lio stared at it, unable to muster the self-control required to drag his eyes away. “Meis makes a mean lasagna, and you kinda look like you need someone to sit you down and make sure you eat—no offense.” His grin grew a little on the last few words and Lio didn’t know what was being said anymore but he returned that expression, dazed and helpless.

“I think I’ll pass,” he said anyway. “You barely know me, you shouldn’t have to _handle_ me.” But he felt bad refusing when they were being so kind, even if he couldn’t fathom why anyone would want his company. “I have a psych appointment on Thursday—I could do dinner next Sunday?” he offered, tentative. It didn’t seem like he had anything worth receiving.

“Sounds good,” Gueira agreed. “You’ll be all done by then and you can give me an in-person review and everything.” He handed Lio his shirt.

“I’ll leave you a nice one on Yelp too,” Lio promised, half-joking. His head was suspiciously quiet.

Gueira scrawled his number on Lio’s arm with the skin marker before Lio left. “Just in case you need anything,” he said, sounding terribly serious for once. “Don’t hesitate to call us, okay?” He dropped Lio’s arm. His skin tingled. Not dissimilar to the throbbing on his back, but just from being touched by another person—another Burnish.

“Why are you doing this?” Lio asked. The numbers swam in his gaze. “Why do you _care_?”

“Is it so hard to believe?” Gueira looked pained and he turned away as though to hide his face. “We’re _Burnish_ , Lio. We take care of our own.”

Lio didn’t know what to say to do that. He nodded gratefully and climbed into the cab, exhausted already. His throat hurt and he wanted fire, wanted to burn something. Wanted to burn himself, because surely he deserved it. Hadn’t he wanted it for long enough now?

He saved Gueira’s number to his phone in a fit of weakness.

—/—

The psychiatrist was a tall, stocky man with iron-grey hair and eyes of the same shade. Everything about him was the same color, actually, a jarring monotone grey. But he smiled kindly at Lio when he came in, even as Lio tensed against a wave of claustrophobia.

His smile compressed to a thin-lipped severity as Lio filled him in on the details of his past—the brief substance abuse, the incident that had landed him in the hospital for the first time and gotten him put on suppressants, that he hadn’t been off of them in eight years. That the voices were back, in his dreams and out of it, that he kept feeling the urge to burn things. Even his own things, even himself.

“Are the suppressants the only medication you’re ever been put on?” Doctor Andreas asked.

“Yes,” Lio said, shifting in his seat. He didn’t know what to make of the way he was being looked at. “They, they changed the kind after I turned eighteen so I wasn’t so nonfunctional but, yeah.”

“Mr Fotia,” Andreas said urgently. “You should _never_ have been put on suppressants in the first place.”

Lio’s world tilted off-course. “What?” he said faintly.

Andreas shook his head. “These medications are far too strong for a teenager. They’re far too strong for _anyone._ You never posed enough of a danger to anyone to warrant them. In fact, they were never for commercial use, only for emergency use in the case of Burnish who were genuinely distressed to the point of lashing out, unable to cope, and _also_ powerful enough to destroy a city by themselves. That’s not you, Mr Fotia. It never was.”

“I’m an omega-class Burnish,” Lio said numbly. “Right?”

“Well, yes,” Andreas said impatiently. “But you’re not out of control, and you’re not dangerous. Very few Burnish truly are, when it comes down to it. The most danger you pose is to yourself.”

“I hear voices,” Lio croaked. He didn’t know what he was trying to say. He didn’t know how to believe it when he was finally being told what he’d always wanted to hear. “I hear voices and they want me to burn _everything,_ not just myself.”

Andreas sighed. “Have you willingly used your powers in the past eight years?”

Lio stared at him. “ _No._ I would never—” 

“Well, there’s your problem,” Andreas cut in. “If you don’t use your powers, they _will_ make their displeasure heard. It’s not unlike a muscle, Mr Fotia. It must be used and stretched once in a while.”

“I’m not dangerous?” Lio asked desperately. “All those times I was told I was—it’s not _true_?”

“No,” Andreas said firmly. “This is a gross— _misdemeanour,_ I dare say. To put a child on medicines like this is nothing short of incredible cruelty. I’m so sorry, Mr Fotia.”

Lio was shaking so badly he could barely see straight. “I,” he started. “I need a minute.”

He paced the waiting room of the clinic, hands wrapped around himself to quell the shake. _Not crazy,_ he thought, but that didn’t feel right. _Not dangerous._ Not dangerous. Not a danger to others—just himself. Not even that, if he used his powers.

If he used his powers. He pried his hands out of his shirt with difficulty, holding them in front of himself. They trembled so badly it hurt. He had to fight down a wave of revulsion as he called up the flames, heat singeing his skin.

That was as far as he got before the sickness killed the fire. He dropped his hands back to his sides, angry and terrified.

When he went back in, Andreas was typing away at his laptop. “Are you alright, Mr Fotia?”

Lio nodded. His mouth was dry. “What do I do now?”

“I’m going to take you off these medicines,” Andreas said at once. “And I recommend you go to regular therapy, starting as soon as possible. I made a list of therapists who specialize in working with Burnish like yourself, and you would do well to receive some kind of external support. We can meet again to discuss that.”

“Thank you for your time,” Lio said, defaulting to the kind of polite he’d learnt as a child. 

His leaving was rather abrupt, he realized when he was already home. But he hadn’t managed to stop shaking the entire time he was in the cab, and had no idea how he found himself inside his flat.

He considered calling someone, but who would he call? He doubted Meis and Gueira wanted to be bothered about something like this, and he couldn’t imagine Kray _not_ yelling at him, if he even picked up the phone. He almost called his parents, just to shout. Just to ask why they’d put him on something that had destroyed his life and mind for almost a decade. But there was no point to any of those decisions and in the end he simply crawled into bed fully clothed and trembled under the sheets until a miserable sleep overtook him.

The next day Lio set fire to his pills. He couldn’t summon his own fire on purpose, not after so many years practicing keeping it locked down, but he had that lighter.

He held it to the pills and felt hot tears drip down his cheeks and refused to acknowledge the stinging pain as his fingers healed. Over and over. Watching the pretty blue pills turn to a blackened, charred mess.

 _Eight years_ of his life. How did one even _mourn_ that?

He held the lighter to his wrist and only managed to mess up the coloring on the sleeve tattoo.

He couldn’t _stop_ trying to burn himself. It never worked, not with him being fucking fireproof and all. But he couldn’t summon the fire inside him either. The screams in his head grew louder and louder. He took a couple days off work, and must have sounded sick enough on the phone that his supervisor didn’t question him. 

But he texted Meis to ask if his last session could be postponed by a couple days. Meis agreed, and asked once more if he wanted to have dinner with them.

This time, Lio said yes. Almost vengefully, fighting the part of himself that still believed he was dangerous. That was _all_ he’d been for so long, it seemed impossible to be anything else. With that limit no longer holding him back, he could reach out to anyone. Hold anything. The possibilities frightened him. 

He doubted he’d be very good company, off-kilter as he was right now, but if nothing else he’d fuck something up badly enough that they never asked to see him again and then he could be awful and monstrous by himself for the rest of his life. The thought made him nauseous, because it would mean that it wasn’t _fire_ that had made him abhorrent but something more intrinsic, something about _him_. And then he thought _I’m nothing if not fire,_ and remembered why he’d spent the last eight years feeling so devastatingly empty.

He went to dinner anyway, reckless or brave or just desperate, wearing a staider version of his clubbing clothes. Figured he’d fit right in to the casual punk look Meis and Gueira had going, and dithered on whether to buy wine.

In the end Lio bought a six-pack of beer. To his knowledge, Burnish couldn’t get drunk—Lio _could_ get inebriated while on his medication, but he didn’t think that would be the case off of it. And yet he couldn’t think of anything else, and felt keenly the weight of his own inexperience as he rode the subway to the address they’d texted him, not far from the parlour.

If it went on for long enough, loneliness became less a malady than a way of life. A physical object that he lived with and navigated around. And now that object was growing more and more intangible, leaving behind empty space Lio had to rush to fill.

 _I don’t know what I’m doing,_ he thought. _I don’t know how to be what I could have been._

Acknowledging it like that made it seem more real, and more bitter. What could he have been, if he hadn’t spent years snatching his hands back from every person who reached out? Would he be better, or worse? Who had he been, before that person had been stolen out from inside him?

All that _time,_ stolen. An entire person cut out of reality by a series of events he’d had almost no hand in, though looking back he could see the cracks where he should have dug his heels in. He’d been tired, even then, of always being the disappointment, but he’d thought if he let them cut the cancer out of him he’d be something _alright._ Something they could stand to look at, if not someone they loved.

He didn’t let himself carry that thought to its conclusion. There were some realities he wouldn’t look at without alcohol in him and this was one of them.

“Hi,” Meis said, when Lio knocked. “We're running a little late, c’mon in.”

Lio checked the time on his phone. “You said seven,” he pointed out, reasonably confused. Sometimes he lost time to the voices.

Their house was so warm and lived-in it made Lio’s stomach ache when he stepped inside. All Burnish preferred steel and glass to wood, but the walls were hung with band posters and tattoo designs that softened the hard edges, and a guitar and drum set occupied one corner of the hall. Carpets on the floor, dark green and worn-soft—even the furniture was comfortable, mismatched in a way that was more inviting than anything else.

“We’re running late,” Meis repeated, grinning ruefully. Lio handed him the beer, smiling back awkwardly.

Gueira was standing next to the oven with his hands on his hips. “I think it’s ready,” he informed Meis. “Hello, Lio.”

“Hello,” Lio answered. The lasagna, if that was what it was, smelled stupidly good. It made him realize he hadn’t eaten a full meal since he returned from the psychiatrist’s office, and couldn’t remember why he’d thought that was a good idea. “Dinner?” he said hopefully.

“Yes,” they said, almost together. 

“I'm glad you're hungry,” Meis added.

Lio leaned against the edge of the table and watched as they set everything up. The aching weight of his thoughts faded as he watched them—they were so real, and so wonderful, that he couldn't regret what brought him closer to them. “Gueira told me you fix instruments?” he said to Meis. Even starting a conversation tasted new when he was light with knowing that he could feel out all the edges of it if he so chose. Not every part, but more than he had before.

“Yeah,” Meis said brightly. “And I play the drums, so,” he shrugged. “Sometimes I get them cheap because they’re broken and fix them enough to play.”

“That’s so cool,” Lio said. It had never really occurred to him that _everyone_ could take pride in what they did. “Can you play the guitar as well?”

Meis shook his head, pointing at Gueira. “That’s that one.”

“Learnt in school,” Gueira informed him.

“I can’t play anything,” Lio said regretfully. “I used to sing a little, but not in years.” The words slipped out, a truth he’d forgotten.

“We could start a band,” Gueira said. “Oh, fuck _off_ Meis.” Meis flicked a napkin at Gueira and winked at Lio, making Lio smile. They were so _good_ together it hurt to watch—he couldn’t help being glad that he got to see them. The effortless grace of their bodies in the cramped kitchen space, how they didn’t bump into each other once. “We’d be a _great_ band. Tell him, Lio.”

“You guys would be great,” Lio snorted. “I’d be _awful._ I haven’t sung in over a decade, you don’t want me in your band.”

“I don’t want _him_ in my band,” Meis cried, punching Gueira in the arm.

Gueira made a wounded expression. “You can’t be a band by _yourself,_ you idiot.”

“I’m very talented,” Meis said stubbornly, and Lio doubled over laughing.

The lasagna was very cheesy, and delicious for it. And both of them were easy to talk to, folding him into the conversation like they were used to having him around—even when he fell quiet and fell back, watching them for cues, they didn’t seem to mind. He relaxed as the hour passed, was loose-limbed and warm by the time dessert came around.

“You had an appointment,” Meis said afterward, when they were in the living room with beer. “How’d it go? You okay?”

Lio bristled at the question, but forced himself to calm down. This was normal, he reminded himself. Friendly. They weren’t out to get him, and they probably wouldn’t be offended if he shook his head and changed the subject. So he said, “They took me off my meds, that’s all,” with a studied casualness.

Gueira winced. “That’s a pretty big change. I hope you’re adjusting fine.” It was earnestly meant, Lio thought, and his chest ached.

“I’m—okay,” he replied, not wanting to lie to their kindness, but not knowing what truth to tell.

Meis patted his shoulder. “Call us if you need anything,” he said firmly. “I know Gueira said this already, but it’s important for Burnish to look out for each other. It’s important for _us_ to look out for other Burnish.”

“Why?” Lio asked, small and confused.

“We wouldn’t be where we are if older, more experienced Burnish hadn’t helped us,” Gueira supplied. “We’re not nothing alone, but we’re everything with each other.”

The sincerity in Gueira’s voice made Lio’s cheeks burn. It was odd to realize he’d never before encountered anything quite like it. He fiddled with the tab on his can and said, haltingly, “I’ve never had friends before.”

“You could do worse than us,” Gueira said gently.

“You could do a lot better also,” Meis interrupted, light. “But we’re a good start.”

 _You’re way better than I deserve,_ Lio thought. “You might be biting off more than you thought with me,” he said blandly. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“Consider us warned,” Meis snorted.

From there they moved to lighter topics, like Lio’s line of work and Meis’s strange passion for German pop punk from before the turn of the millenium. They treated him no differently for knowing what they did. He found it hard to stop pushing at that, testing the limit of their acceptance. It remained elastic.

Even when Lio’s sleeve slipped back enough for them to catch the melted remains of the tattoo that had covered his wrist. He got a sharp look from Meis but he said nothing, and Gueira only offered to touch it up free of charge. “I’ll pay,” Lio insisted.

“Don’t worry about it,” Gueira said kindly.

They hugged him before he left, a long moment from each of them. “Good night,” Meis whispered as he let go of Lio. “Text us when you get home, okay?”

“Okay,” Lio answered, stomach squirming with butterflies. Not just the touch, though that too. They were both hot in a way he couldn’t let himself notice for too long and couldn’t stop catching sight of between breaths. They were also married to each other, he reminded himself firmly. He didn’t have any right to intrude on that, and neither would they let him. That they wanted to be friends with him was more than he had a right to want.

He fell asleep almost the second he hit the bed, and didn’t dream of anything. Not his childhood and not screaming, just the deep dark calm of sleep.

—/—

On Monday, on his lunch break, he called his mother.

It remained as fruitless and painful an endeavour as always. He sat through as much news as he could bear of his siblings—none of them Burnish—their lives and marriages and babies, before interrupting his mother’s sweet-voiced rambling. “Do you know why they put me on suppressants, mum?”

There was a long pause, where Lio looked out of the window at the gripping blue of the Promepolis sky and all its glass and cement skyline. Then she said, “Well, of course darling. They said you were dangerous and advised us to put you on the medications.”

She still wouldn’t call them suppressants if she could, determined to avoid his reality. _Darling._ Lio felt sour and heavy. “I spoke to another doctor,” he said evenly. “I was told I should never have been put on the suppressants at all. That I’m not dangerous.”

“I’m sure they’d say that,” Marian dismissed. “They don’t know you like we do.”

“What does that mean?” Lio asked. He felt ashen inside, dead. “What does that _mean_ , mum?”

“Oh, Lio,” she started, then sighed. “You were such a serious child. So determined to fight everything you considered unjust, and you never wanted to listen to your father or me when we tried to teach you how the world worked. What would you have done if you could set things on fire? You were quite mad—I shudder to think about it—and your father concurred, thankfully, as did the doctors.”

“You put me on the meds to control me,” Lio interpreted dully. “Because I was an inconvenience.”

“Don’t be silly, darling,” Marian said. “Really, you talk as though we’re out to _get_ you. I promise we’re your friends, Lio.”

“I don’t have friends,” Lio snapped, suddenly awake, and the line went dead.

He’d melted through his phone, he realized. It was just a lump of smoking glass and metal in his hand, slightly warm. Well, that clarified whether he could call it up (ha) on purpose, didn’t it? He went back inside, and went back to work. Three calls before lunch and three scheduled for after, and if he finished them he could go home and maybe sleep for a while.

His supervisor today was a recently promoted Burnish woman. He liked her, pink-dyed hair and all. She wandered over as the second call was winding up. “Lio, are you okay?”

Lio stared at her, blank. “Yes. Why?”

“You’re on fire,” she told him, and he looked down and realized that he was, in fact, on fire.

“Oh,” he said, almost comically out of touch.

“Go home,” she said.

He went. Wondered if it was permissible to pop a suppressant before remembering he’d fucking burnt all of them. Well, fuck. He ran a cold shower instead, burying his fire under his skin bit by bit, hissing as cold water made contact with his hot skin. The thick resulting steam made him dizzy and lightheaded, cutting off his fire more effectively than the water itself did.

He didn’t know how long he sat there under the spray, shivering and shaking. Only that it was dark outside when he turned the water off. He made his way back out, teeth chattering with cold.

Lio could hardly fall asleep, even cold and tired to the bone, but he couldn’t do anything else either. There was just himself and the endless dark inside him where fire was supposed to be, fire he’d methodically rinsed out of himself.

He couldn’t stop thinking about his parents, about his childhood, about the perfect confusion in his mother’s voice as she admitted to using medication to keep him under control.

Who _did_ that? What kind of parent did that to their _child_?

What kind of child made it necessary? He could hardly remember his own past that well. Maybe it had been not just the right thing to do but the _only_ thing to do—what did Andreas know? Perhaps Lio _was_ a threat. Perhaps they’d done well to quell his fire. Lio had always known there was something wrong with him that went deeper than the voices and the fire, and now he knew for sure. He was broken in a way that couldn't be fixed.

He cried into the sheets until he couldn’t cry anymore, burning hands wrapped around himself in an attempt to guard against the cold.

—/—

Lio drifted through the rest of the week in a strange daze, like he was piloting a mecha rather than living inside his body. Everything felt distant, the colours warped and the shapes unfamiliar. He took calls and talked to people and squashed down his fire as a reflex. At home he showered in cold water and didn’t recognize his face in the mirror.

He only barely remembered to order another phone online. It arrived brand new and silver, and he stared down at it and realized he’d never speak to his mother again. Ever. It didn’t feel as devastating as it should have.

Meis hugged him when Lio arrived for his last session. “You okay?” he asked.

“Yes,” Lio answered, but the words were clumsy and foreign in his mouth. “Just—withdrawal.” He said it to deflect, but it was true. How had he not realized it was true? “I’ll be okay in a while,” he promised.

“Oh, Lio,” Meis said kindly. “You don’t have to be.”

Lio ignored this, because it made his stomach squirm. Handed Meis his phone so he could add his own and Gueira’s numbers again, and lay down for Gueira to lay down the last of the colors—orange and hints of red for highlights. Didn’t even realize that his mind was full of buzzing screams until they quieted under the needle.

He _was_ crazy, he decided, and then decided not to think about it further.

He couldn’t move afterwards, though, too tired and still so heavy and distant from himself that he tripped over his feet when he tried to walk. “Sit down for a while,” Gueira ordered. “And—Meis?”

“On it,” Meis said, which Lio didn’t parse until a bottle of Gatorade was pressed into his hand.

Lio drank it in tiny sips, struggling not to fall asleep on them. Gueira was sitting at his desk, and Meis was messing on his phone, and Lio wanted to go curl up in a corner and just sleep so badly he kept having to remind himself exactly why it was a _bad_ idea to do that. Just because his head was quiet for the first time in days didn’t mean he could get complacent—

Why did his thoughts _always_ sound like he was in a war?

“Can I ask you guys something?”

“Sure,” Meis said first.

“Go ahead,” Gueira added.

Lio fiddled with the sticker on the bottle, trying to figure out how to phrase his question in a way that didn’t make him sound as crazy as he was. Failed. “Nevermind.”

“No,” Meis snorted. “Out with it.”

Lio looked down stubbornly. “No.”

“Fotia,” Meis started.

“Leave him be,” Gueira interrupted, sounding worn. “Meis.”

“Do you think I’m crazy?” Lio blurted out, and then scrambled for a way to make that sound like anything except the desperate plea it was. “I mean—” They stared at him, shocked. He couldn’t figure out where to put his gaze. “You can say yes,” he finished lamely.

Gueira recovered first. “Maybe,” he said, gentle and thoughtful. Lio made a bitter sound. Gueira continued over him, “And maybe it’s not a bad thing.”

“How is it _not_ ,” Lio snapped, voice ugly and breaking.

“Because it isn’t,” Meis cut in. He was leaning forward, visible eye bright and hard. “You’re not bad because you’re in pain. That’s not how it _works_.”

“I’m bad because I’m dangerous,” Lio returned, an old hand at this particular argument.

“About as dangerous as a wet kitten,” Meis snorted.

“Meis,” Gueira warned. “That’s enough.”

Lio’s cheeks were red, and it was suddenly taking everything he had not to burst into flame. “I,” he tried. “I don’t—”

Gueira was at his side suddenly, squeezing his shoulder. “Breathe, Lio.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Lio snarled, but he drew in a rattling, shuddery breath. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry—oh. Oh, god.” Gueira drew him closer, the kind of hug Lio couldn’t remember anyone giving him, the side of his face against Gueira’s stomach. “I’m sorry.”

He didn’t even know what he was apologizing for. Having a fucking breakdown on them, maybe.

“Stop,” Gueira murmured. “It’s okay.”

“Okay,” Lio whispered, because he didn’t have all that much fight in him. Even the urge to burn something had faded. By the time Gueira let him pull away, he mostly felt empty. Shipwrecked, still somehow dragging himself around.

“Call me when you get home,” Gueira instructed.

Lio nodded, and avoided Meis’s eyes as he left. He didn’t say, _I don’t know why you bother with me_ again. He was sinking to depths of pathetic that were hitherto unplumbed, but he hadn’t yet repeated himself.

This time Lio remembered to call, if only because he didn’t think about anything else all the way home. Gueira picked up on the first ring. “You’re home safe?”

“Yes,” Lio said, inexplicably soothed by the worry in Gueira’s voice. Even though he knew it was wrong to be glad someone was wasting worry on him, it was nice to feel like someone out there cared, and that they cared even _after_ he’d broken in such a shamefully visible fashion.

“Good,” Gueira said, soft. “Meis is sorry for arguing with you.”

“Meis can deliver his apologies to me in person,” Lio said without thinking. Then he bit his tongue.

Gueira laughed. “I can give him the phone.”

“Not if he doesn’t want to talk to me,” Lio replied. He found himself smiling, strangely, and threw himself into a corner of the couch. Wrapped his arm around his knee and rested his head against them, trying to preserve the sticky feeling inside him.

“Are you kidding? He feels _terrible._ He’d love to talk to you.”

“That makes no sense,” Lio murmured, but there was a shuffle and a curse.

“Hello,” Meis said. He sounded a little breathless. They were probably home right now, Lio realized. He’d imagined them in the parlour as a default setting, but it was almost night, and they were home. “I’m sorry I yelled at you.”

“I’m sorry too,” Lio said, trying to be playful. “You’re very rude, you know.”

“But I’m right,” Meis started.

“ _Not again_ ,” Gueira yelled, loudly enough to be heard.

Lio laughed, hugging himself a little tighter. He hadn’t switched on the lights, but he stared out of the window at the office building opposite. It was still lit in square windows, people moving inside. “You’re going to have a field day trying to convince me you’re right,” he said, because it was easier to say these things out loud to a dark apartment.

“I hate that shit,” Meis muttered. “Crazy, broken. All of it. I’m blind in one eye, y’know, and everyone and their fuckin’ gran wants to tell me it’s ‘cause my parents were in a Burnish accident like I don’t already know. How does it matter? _I’m_ still Burnish.”

“I didn’t know you were blind in one eye,” Lio said quietly. “And I hear voices. I always have. They’re not wrong about me being crazy.”

“It’s not a _bad_ thing,” Meis said. “Being crazy, or having parts missing. You shouldn’t have been hurt for it.”

“You don’t have to try to convince me,” Lio tried, gently.

“No one deserves to walk around believing _that_ about themself—” Meis began, and then there was another brief scuffle and a distant _honestly, enough!_ before the line switched to Gueira. 

“I’m sorry about that,” he said gruffly.

“It’s okay,” Lio replied, and it _was._ One of the squares opposite him went dark. “Tell him I appreciate it.”

There was a pause. “I’ll do that. And Lio?”

Lio hummed, still thinking.

“Eat something before you sleep,” Gueira said.

“Okay,” Lio smiled, even though they couldn’t see him. That sticky-sweet heat inside him had spread to occupy every inch of room. His heart ached with every beat. “G’night.”

“Night,” Gueira echoed. The line went quiet.

—/—

Life went on, somehow. Lio didn’t know what he’d expected, but even the ripples of large changes faded out slowly, or he got more used to swimming in the changed currents. He couldn’t call up his fire at will, but he no longer tried to burn himself out of sickly spite. Sometimes he texted Meis or Gueira, once for Meis’s lasagna recipe (it wasn’t the same when Lio tried it at home) or to show Gueira a photo of his healed back. He dithered over that one, the strange intimacy of it, but Gueira had seen it already. He deserved to see the end of his gorgeous handiwork.

He had his first therapy appointment a month later. Layla Vrachos was a staid, calm woman in neatly casual clothes, and it was astonishingly easy to want to talk to her. It was harder to actually _say_ things, but she kept telling him they had time, that he didn’t have to rush.

He repeated it to himself like a prayer, _I have time I have time I have time,_ when he was at home fiddling with his phone trying to figure out what to say to Gueira and Meis.

Lio still couldn’t imagine they wanted to be his friends. But they replied to every inane thing he sent them, rough sketches of tattoo ideas Lio didn’t really like enough to want on himself and requests for music recs that came back with a plea to watch a crime thriller that Gueira didn’t care for so Meis would have someone to talk to about it, his phone pinging through the day. They were the only people, apart from Layla and his supervisors at work, who had this number.

The screaming in his head had never really gone away, but he could manage it better now. Sometimes he could even _talk_ to them, ask them to quiet down for a few moments so he could take a call or read something. Sometimes they talked back. There were weekends when all he did was sit at home and converse with them, pick out the meaning in the lilt of their voices. It should have made him feel crazier than ever, talking to them like they were real—but _weren’t_ they real? Real enough for his purposes, anyway, and who _cared_ if he was crazy as long as he didn’t _feel_ so alone and broken anymore. Even if there were days when those were the only conversations he had.

And anyway Layla said anything was fine as long as it didn’t hurt anyone and made _him_ feel better, and she had a _degree,_ so his mom’s voice in his head could find a lemon and suck on it.

—/—

When the girl who sat next to him at the office leaned over and asked if he wanted to come out with them for drinks that Friday after work Lio didn’t think twice before agreeing, and then panicked at home about it.

A wall between himself and everyone else was lonely but it was also a shell, something that meant Lio couldn’t get hurt in a new and unfamiliar way. He’d never learnt to deal with new forms of pain—always trapped in the old circles. Staying inside his self-made prison was _hard_ , but so was stepping out; it took him a day and a half to convince himself he could go, that he wouldn’t fuck it up somehow.

He _did_ fuck it up, but only a little. Teresa laughed it off and so did Lio, after a moment.

Meis and Gueira invited him for dinner again, but instead of going to their house Lio was texted directions to a restaurant. They were already there when Lio walked in. “Hi,” he said breathlessly, sliding into the seats opposite them. They always looked so _good._ Lio’s mouth was dry.

He knew his desire was wrong, but most days the experience of _wanting_ was itself so new he didn’t recognize it in time to punish himself and other days—other days he was weak.

“I hope you like pizza,” Meis said seriously.

“No trouble yet,” Lio replied, smiling in that helpless way he always did around them.

Gueira ordered for him after a brief and impressively serious perusal of the menu. “He won’t get you anything you don’t like,” Meis reassured Lio at his apprehensive look, and Lio flushed and glanced away and didn’t try to explain himself for once.

But he relaxed again. He always did with them. Even the voices were pleased, quieting down in their presence without being asked—as enamoured with them as he was.

Meis invited him home for coffee and a movie after dinner, before Gueira punched him in the arm and reminded him that Lio would have to travel a long distance home afterwards. Meis apologized, but Lio had already agreed to it.

“I’m an adult,” he said dismissively when Gueira frowned at him. “I can travel home in the dark.”

“ _I_ know you’re an adult,” Gueira replied, pinched. “I’m just worried about all the people who _don’t_ know that—”

Meis snorted. “You’re really endearing yourself to him by implying he’s going to get mugged.”

“I’ll be fine,” Lio insisted loudly.

“Besides,” Meis interjected, smug. “He can sleep over.”

A painful thrill rang through Lio. “I can?”

“Sure,” Gueira said, still frowning. “We have a guest bedroom, and we can lend you clothes. You don’t have to, obviously,” he added hastily, like that was the problem here. Lio felt lightheaded with his good fortune. “We can do a movie some other time.”

“I want to watch that stupid European one Meis was talking about,” Lio heard himself say.

“It wasn’t stupid,” Meis started. Gueira dragged him away. Lio followed after them, giggling.

He sipped sweet coffee on the floor with the movie on, dozing with his head against Meis’s thigh. He hated having his back to other people, but it was different with them. He couldn’t imagine these hands hurting him. It was a terribly boring documentary thing and Lio felt _unbearably_ happy, not least because Meis’s hands had found their way to Lio’s hair and were carding gently through it. He hardly noticed when the credits rolled, though Gueira nudged him gently.

“You’re sleepy as fuck,” he noted. “Let me get you a change of clothes, c’mon.”

“Okay,” Lio said, agreeable. Meis stayed behind to clean up.

It was only when he was standing in their bedroom watching Gueira shuffle through his cupboard that he realized it had been terribly rude of him to nuzzle up against Gueira’s husband like that. “I’m sorry,” he said awkwardly, accepting the t-shirt and pants he was handed. “I shouldn’t—touch you guys so much.”

“ _What_ are you talking about,” Gueira said. 

He looked puzzled and genuinely concerned, and also like he thought Lio was joking. Lio flushed, ashamed. He couldn’t shake the idea that he was creating some elaborate facade they felt justified in caring about, when he was terrible and useless underneath. “I was practically in Meis’s lap,” he said lamely, looking down at his feet. “It’s—it’s _rude_ , and after everything you’ve ever done for me—”

“Don’t be _silly_ ,” Gueira said firmly. “Lio. Look at me.”

“Huh?” Lio looked up. 

Gueira was watching him with an expression Lio couldn’t parse except that it was serious, and intense. Lio waited, heart hammering in his chest. There would come a moment when everything fell apart and this was that moment, he was sure. The part where he broke everything and spent the rest of his life gathering the pieces.

“You’re our _friend_ ,” Gueira said softly. Lio jerked a little, unused to hearing those words in relation to himself. “And we _like_ you. We like you so much, and we don’t want to hurt you.”

“What?” Lio said blankly.

“It’s okay to touch us,” Gueira ended finally. That wasn’t what Lio had expected. None of this was anything Lio had expected. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

 _What if I hurt you,_ Lio thought, but there was a series of assumptions one had to buy into for that to be a reasonable statement and Meis and Gueira had both made it clear that they weren’t interested in that at all. He curled up on the freshly-laundered sheets of the bed in the guest room and sang pop songs from ten years back to the voices in his head until he fell asleep.

In the morning when he woke up there was breakfast, sandwiches and eggs and donuts from a local shop. If watching them over dinner was pleasant, this was almost deliriously beautiful; a perfect picture of morning domesticity.

They were shamelessly touchy with each other and almost as physical with him, though perhaps not as intimately. Still, Meis’s hand combed stray tangles from Lio’s hair while he sipped at coffee, and Gueria poked at his back until he took off the shirt and showed off his now fully-healed tattoo, that fiery dragon in all her blazing glory. “This is seriously good work,” Meis said, mouth full, and Lio agreed, and Gueira grinned and blushed. A hand touched Lio’s back, warm, and he tensed despite himself. He was still getting used to skin-to-skin contact. The hand fell away. Lio still didn’t know which of them it was. He wished, oddly, that he _did_ know—wished he could see the face Meis might make, or the savage satisfaction in Gueira’s eyes. He realized, suddenly, that he trusted Gueira with his skin and his heart and Meis with the tangled aching strings that connected them. And he hadn’t trusted anyone in so long.

“When are you doing up my wrists,” Lio asked playfully, trying to cover up his weakness, and came back to his own apartment with a date in the calendar.

He still didn’t feel good, most days, was worse sometimes than he ever had been in the past and couldn’t see past his hands for his own tears. He still had no fire and too much screaming and cancelled plans as often as he followed through on them. But he texted Meis and Gueira almost every other day and it didn’t matter so much that he had been crying for three hours that day if he got to talk to them.

Lio still slipped more often than not. He still didn’t remember to eat.

He saw Kray on the news one night, talking about an implant for Burnish that could permanently suppress their powers. He’d tried it on himself, apparently, and it had worked beautifully. Lio rewound the clip again and again, searching Kray’s face and body for any sign of the person Lio had known and touched. But Lio hardly knew who _that_ had been, and if the man he’d once loved was broken then maybe this was the fixed version.

Lio wanted to cry. He stared at the last frozen frame, Kray’s sharp white suit and proud smile, and tried to summon up the emotion necessary. Everything inside him remained still and quiet, pity without compassion.

 _We were never the same,_ he thought, and shocked himself with it.

All those years Kray had told them both that Burnish as powerful as them couldn’t help hurting people, that they could only mitigate the damage and keep themselves on a leash, all those years of Lio being the mitigated damage and believing himself ruined for it—and then _this_ , the icy clarity of a realization long overdue. They had never been the same.

Kray had always chosen to hurt him. How had Lio not seen that before?

He stumbled to the bathroom on shaking legs and ran the tap before cupping his hands in front of himself. This time they blazed. _Holy fuck._

Lio didn’t sleep all night, because his hands were on fire. He kept putting them out for seconds at a time before bringing them back, giggling wetly to himself at the transparent joy in the voices. They loved being let out to play after all these years trapped inside an unforgiving and harsh body. They loved _him,_ flames licking up his arms and touching his clothes without burning them, as though they knew. As though they _cared._

He called Meis and Gueira as early the next morning as was socially acceptable, not having slept at all and still wired to high heavens. The phone rang itself into silence and Lio pouted, unable to shake off his good mood, and by the time he was done showering he’d received a call back. “Hey, Lio,” Gueira said, voice rough with sleep.

“Sorry,” Lio replied. “It’s too early. I can call back—”

“Don’t be silly,” Gueira admonished, and then yawned. “What’s up?”

“I got my fire back,” Lio said, trying to keep the excitement to somewhat reasonable levels. “My Burnish fire, Gueira, I—” his voice cracked and he raced over it, ashamed “—my _Burnish_ fire. I haven’t had it in nearly a _decade_.”

“Lio,” Gueira said warmly. “That’s amazing. It really _is_ —I’m so happy for you.”

“Thank you,” Lio replied, relieved and awed. “I just—I had to tell _someone._ ” _I wanted to tell you._ “I’m sorry to bother you.”

“You don’t have to be sorry,” Gueira told him, in the tone of someone who had said this a hundred times before. “You never have to be sorry for calling us, Lio. It’s amazing, and you should do something to celebrate.”

“I haven’t celebrated anything in a long time,” Lio confessed. “Not even birthdays.” It had always felt rather too indulgent, and then plain pathetic to do so alone.

“Lio,” Gueira said. “Come over for dinner tonight.”

“ _No_. I couldn’t possibly impose on you that much—”

“It’s not—” there was a bang and a clatter and some swearing, while Lio tried to figure out what had happened. Then Meis said, “Get your ass here by seven, Fotia, or else—” another scuffle, and Gueira again. “Sorry about that,” he started with, then continued apologetically, “But he’s right.”

“Both of you are far too kind to me,” Lio murmured, helpless and warm.

Gueira muttered something too fast for Lio to catch. “Just come over, Lio.”

But he had to stay late at work, covering a shift for Teresa, and it was awfully late by the time he got to their house. The door was open when he tried it, and he went in only to find Meis and Gueira making out on the couch.

 _Ten years,_ he thought suddenly. It would be their anniversary soon. He’d known they loved each other, but for all their visible affection it had never been so _blatant._ Meis’s hand rested on Gueira’s arm, steadying him where he was half on Meis’s lap. They kissed with the easy familiarity of people who’d known each other for so long they knew each other’s bodies as their own—Lio had never in two years found that ease with Kray, nor that tenderness. His heart ached—he couldn’t imagine himself having something like this, but he could imagine himself across the room in their arms. There was a gap between Meis and the couch and Gueira’s arms looked awfully welcoming. Lio would have fit with them, and he could make himself small. He’d make himself anything they could stand to have around.

The realization, the echoing desire in his stomach, terrified him. There was a reason Lio didn’t let himself want; he always latched onto what he wasn’t allowed to have. They were _married_ and in love and that they were kind to him was _enough_ and he had no right to ask for or even _want_ more than that.

He stumbled back out through the door and ran into the night, eyes burning with hot tears. He didn’t even let himself think about what he’d done until he was clinging to the handrails in the subway, wiping at his eyes. But he couldn’t have watched that for another second without snapping somewhere crucial and he couldn’t have sat there all night _wanting_ them and _not_ come out of it hating himself.

Meis texted him the next morning, and Lio told him work ran late. He received a message back almost immediately, _when do u wanna reschedule._ Lio bit his lip and thought about it for an entire two minutes before putting his phone away.

He ignored Gueira’s increasingly worried messages too. It was a dick move, he knew rationally, but panic seized his organs whenever he tried to type out a reply.

Later that week he stared at the last of the texts ( _are you okay, Lio?_ ) and typed out, _I love you so much and I can’t do this anymore._

He stared at the words so long his screen died. Then he closed his eyes.

“It’s not abnormal,” Layla told him. “They gave you what you needed when you had nothing. It’s not surprising that you got attached, Lio.”

He stared at his lap. “Would I have fallen in love with _you_ if I’d met you then?” he asked bitterly.

“Depends on whether you’re attracted to women,” she said seriously, while he snorted. He was, but rarely. And not with her. “Patients fall in love with therapists all the time. We often fall for people who give us what we want. The true test of love is whether you’d want them even if you’d met under different circumstances.”

“I’m just digging myself in further thinking about this, aren’t I?” Lio mumbled, helpless and tired. If he closed his eyes he could envision Gueira’s hands with a pen, Meis’s long hair swaying as he leaned into Gueira’s side, the way Meis looked at everything he loved and the way Gueira looked at Lio. Lio never understood what Gueira was seeing in those moments but he understood the warmth he felt, the way safety felt like drowning in an ocean of fire. “I want them all the time.” He laughed harshly. “They’d kick me out and block me if they knew.”

Layla sighed. “They care about you, Lio.”

He snorted again, disbelieving.

“It’s true,” she said sternly. “You are a wonderful person, Lio, and people will continue to see that and love you for it no matter what you wish. From what I know of them, they’re hardly the kind of people to kick you to the curb for falling in love.”

He put his head in his hands, blushing too hard to want to be seen with it. Falling in _love,_ god. He felt like a teenager—scratch that. He’d never been like this around Kray. “I still don’t know what to do,” he whined. “And not replying to messages and holing up in my apartment is working out fine so far.”

“Is that why you’re miserable?” she said dryly. He whined louder.

The thought of summoning his fire once more made his stomach turn. Always a step forward and then two back, like pushing down and away what he felt for them was also pushing down a part of himself. Bitterly poetic in a way Lio half-loathed, wanting fire to make himself feel better—but he’d never have found the ability to burn if not for them and it seemed somehow right that without them, he didn’t have it at all.

He was moved at work, more a half-promotion than a real one, to a department that did on-site aid instead of phone calls. It was hard work and he was out of the house for most of the day, running around the city, but at least the change in pace brought an addition to his paycheck that enabled him to finally, finally buy himself a fucking motorbike.

It also meant he could bike around the city by himself on the nights he was free, which was most of them. Promepolis was beautiful after dark. He drove from end to end, flying down the highway and grinning to himself inside the helmet.

He stopped by a bakery to grab a bite after one on-site aid call—a young girl who had recently come into her Burnish powers after an altercation with her older brother. She’d been terrified of the police and terrified of herself, and Lio was glad for whichever neighbor had the sense to call the Burnish Rehabilitation Agency. He’d sat with her for almost an hour, walking her through the use of her powers and showing her his tattoos, while Thyma spoke to the girl’s parents about regular training sessions and appropriate guidance.

He’d written the protocol for the guidance himself, on his supervisor’s request. A background in law came in handy. He wondered if it couldn’t be put to better use, but the part of him that remembered late nights watching Kray stooped over figures wavered away from anything that resembled ambition.

It had been a shock to realize he had anything to offer other Burnish at all—they’d always seemed so terribly far from him, and different. Lio was a monster, inert without destruction. He’d always believed that his people had enough to deal with, without association with a ticking bomb. Now he wondered what Meis would have had to say about that. He could almost hear Gueira’s voice, but couldn’t let himself imagine what he might say. They were too gentle, too kind, to fit inside his mind.

“You’re good with kids,” Thyma told him afterwards, as they walked to the parking lot. Lio’s bike was there.

“The hell I am,” Lio snorted.

Thyma shook her head. They parted ways, Lio to the bakery and Thyma to her sister’s place. Lio took his phone out as he ate, looking through papers published about Burnish advocacy in the past couple years. He recognized his professor’s names, and cringed at the content.

“Lio!” someone shouted, and Lio half-turned in his seat.

_Meis._

“What are you doing here,” Lio said, blankly terrified, as Meis strode to his table with long light steps.

“I’m doing fine,” Meis said sharply. “What about you.”

Lio blushed hard and put his phone away, facedown. He hadn’t spoken to them since that one aborted night. _Before_ that, considering they hadn’t spoken that night at all. Lio’s attraction had, regretfully, not faded in the least. Meis was tanned by the summer and his hair had purple dyed streaks among the black and Lio wanted to ask when that had happened, wanted to ask how Gueira was doing, any of a hundred other questions that he’d held down for weeks. “I’m fine,” he mumbled. Gestured Meis to the chair opposite him.

A few weeks back Meis wouldn’t have asked before taking it. He did now, but only after a second’s hesitation. “You dropped off the earth,” Meis told him, as though he didn’t already know.

“I,” Lio said intelligently, and then pushed the remainder of his croissant at Meis.

“You can’t distract me that easily,” Meis informed him. He stuffed the entire thing into his mouth in one go regardless, buying Lio time to think.

“I panicked,” he said quickly, apologetically. “About a lot of things, most of them stupid, but I panicked really hard and then I got a promotion and bought a bike I always wanted and I missed you guys so so much and I shouldn’t have done that and—”

Meis held up a finger, swallowed, and washed down the croissant with Lio’s coffee. “You’re fucking rambling,” he said. “You idiot. What did you panic about.”

“You can’t just ask that,” Lio whined, looking firmly down at the crumbs on his plate. He was sure his face was red.

“Yes I _can_ ,” Meis rolled his eyes. “I’m your friend, aren’t I?”

Lio looked away, upset in a way that was awfully familiar. “You’d hate me,” he whispered, because it was true. Because Lio would never _deserve_ being loved back like that. Because Meis was taken and he wasn’t going to look at Lio the same ever again and it mattered so much for all that the words kept rushing out of him as though there was a fire inside. “You’re my _friend_ but _I’m_ in love with you and—and _him_ and it’s been like that for months and I can’t, I _can’t_ take it and you’re going to hate me, oh. Oh _fuck_.”

Meis caught up with him about four feet from his bike, stupid fucking long legs versus Lio’s shaky short ones, _how_ was that even fair. “You’re an idiot,” he was saying, arms tight around Lio’s body, which was also trembling. “You’re such an _idiot_ , Fotia.”

“Let me go,” Lio protested weakly. Flight response aside, his body was primed to relax around Meis. He’d already gone limp.

“No,” Meis said. “Idiot. We love you too.”

“That’s nice,” Lio said nonsensically, before meaning caught up. “Wait, _what_?”

“We love you,” Meis repeated, rather unnecessarily smug.

“Yeah, like _friends_.”

“No,” Meis sighed. “Like we want to kiss you. Why are you _so_ determined to be unhappy?”

Lio sputtered, unable to deny this but resenting the remark nonetheless. Meis held him tighter. “I didn’t know that,” Lio said, voice small. He was exhausted and Meis was warm and familiar and smelled like coffee and butter and himself and Lio wanted him like he’d never stopped. “You were just—so _nice_ to me, and I love you.” He was still shaking, he realized. And his eyes were wet. When had that happened? “I’m sorry,” he added.

“Enough of being sorry. We wanted to be nicer,” Meis said softly. “Come home, Lio.”

This time, Lio went. He couldn’t stop clutching at Meis’s hand like a child afraid of getting lost in the mall, but Meis didn’t try to pull away even once.

Lio did, when they were almost at the door. Panic whipped through him and he desperately tugged his hand out of Meis’s, taking a stumbling half-step backwards. “No, no—I can’t do this. I can’t do this to you guys, what the fuck is _wrong_ with me—”

“Nothing,” Meis said, dragging him back and holding him close again. “Dear god, Lio. What do you _think_ you’re going to do to us?”

“I’m _ruining_ your _marriage_ ,” Lio said hysterically.

“I think I get the last word on that,” Meis said, firm and hard. Lio settled back down, shaking again. His chest was tight with anxiety. “I will _carry_ you, Fotia, so help me. Come. _Inside_.”

“You have to stop scaring him,” was the first thing Gueira said. Lio had given up on parsing what was happening to him. Gueira gave him a quick, welcoming hug, before Lio found himself sitting on the couch. Gueira handed him a glass of water, sitting down next to him. “Are you alright, Lio?”

Lio sagged against him. “I don’t know. Your husband is terrifying.”

Gueira slung an arm over Lio’s shoulders. “That he is.” Lio snuggled into his side, then drew back in on himself when he realized what he was doing. Gueira sighed. “Lio, you _know_ we love you, right?”

“Um,” Lio said. He hadn’t known that. Even when Meis had said it, it hadn’t felt real. _Earned_.

“We love you,” Gueira repeated. “We want you around. For as long as you want to be.”

“As friends,” Lio tried, because he had to be sure. Especially because this was what he’d wanted for so long.

“If that’s what you want to be,” Gueira told him. “We want more than that.”

 _How is it so easy for them?_ Lio wondered. How could Gueira just—just lay everything out on the table, shoulder the risk of rejection and heartbreak—all for someone like _Lio,_ who couldn’t even look them in the eye.

Lio forced himself to meet Gueira’s expression, serious and patient. It was hard to lie to him—scratch that. It was too fucking easy to give in to what Gueira saw in him, no matter how detached it felt from Lio’s reality. “I want more than that too,” he heard himself confess, shaky and tired and true.

Gueira _grinned_ at him, a blazing sunrise smile that took Lio’s breath away. And then they were kissing, Gueira’s mouth warm and gentle and Lio couldn’t believe his luck or this moment but he _could_ throw himself into kissing Gueira back, flinging an arm around his neck and pressing closer to him. He smelled of ink and bloody bruises, something Lio could have breathed in forever. He kissed like he’d never hesitated to touch anyone in his entire life, and yet he was so careful with Lio that his heart ached. He wanted to tell Gueira not to bother, but then he’d lose this wonderful gentleness and he didn’t think he could bear that. It was harder to relinquish something he’d tasted than something he’d never even touched with his own hands.

He was dazed by the time Gueira pulled back, looking around without quite knowing what for—but Meis was already before him. “My turn, Lio?”

Meis was a stupidly good kisser. He cradled Lio’s face in the tips of his fingers while Lio clutched at his shoulders, and he wasn’t thinking at all when the kiss broke. There was nothing to think about, just happiness like honey and sunlight in his body.

“There you are,” Gueira said suddenly, pressing the tips of his fingers to Lio’s burning cheek. His fingers came away pink and green with fire. _Lio’s_ fire. Meis leaned forward, closing his mouth over the sparks.

“Sweet,” he grinned, hot and sure of himself. Lio had never felt so captivated by another person.

And then Gueira pulled him back again and Lio went with it, delirious in the currents of their shameless desire for him. He lost track of how long they kissed him, exchanging him between themselves with precise care. “I love you,” he thought he whimpered, somewhere in the middle of it all or near the end. “Both of you.” He felt near tears, too emotional to keep anything inside. “And I thought you didn’t _want_ me and I—”

“ _Lio_ ,” Meis said. “Oh, Lio. You’re so good, we couldn’t _not_ love you.”

“I don’t understand,” Lio whispered, because he didn’t. He knew that other people were loved, not him. Never him. “I haven’t even done anything.”

“You don’t have to _do_ anything,” Gueira said, kind and sad. Even draped in their warmth Lio felt his disappointment keenly. “You’re wonderful and clever and you try so hard, and you fit with us like you were always meant to be ours. Of _course_ we love you, Lio.”

Lio was still crying. “You make it sound like you don’t have a choice.”

“We have a choice in what we do to you,” Gueira said patiently. “Not in whether we love you.”

“Oh,” Lio started, and then failed to go on, shocked into silence. The words sank inside him slowly, displacing old currents of thought. “Oh.”

Meis pet him gently for a few minutes, and then went away to get started on dinner with one last kiss to his jaw.

They wouldn’t stop touching him all through dinner, like weeks of affection spilling out in one night. It was dizzyingly delightful, the weight of Gueira’s hand on his thigh, Meis touching him every time he walked by to get them seconds.

“Sleep with us,” Meis said afterwards, when Lio was helping him clean up.

Lio felt pink and hot inside with the sweet thrill of being known, the way Meis gave him what he wanted whether or not Lio could let himself take it. He nodded, hip-checked Meis into the sink just for the way he snorted and checked Lio back.

The laser of their focus was intense enough as they’d made out—sex was something else entirely. They undressed him together, lingering on every new expanse of skin bared with the patient delight of explorers. “Relax,” Gueira told him. “Let us take care of you.” Lio’s cheeks went red; he nodded but failed to obey, squirming in their grip and trying to give them what they wanted.

Meis growled, pinning him down, and Lio went limp. They were brutally methodical in taking him apart piece by fucking piece, all intent and danger. How did they _stand_ each other?

Gueira kissed his neck, broad hot hands stroking the dragon he’d put on Lio’s back—and what a thrill to have been marked as _theirs_ long before he knew it himself, like a claim or a prophecy—as Meis fingered him open. He’d stopped being able to say anything other than their names a long time back but even that tapered off into silence as they fucked him, leaving behind only overwhelming waves of pleasure and love so hot and thick it felt like grieving.

He clung to them afterwards, sweaty and sated and determined to never let them go, and fell asleep to Meis’s lips against his neck and Gueira’s hands smoothing over his sides.

—/—

He slept in the next morning, and Meis elected to stay behind while Gueira shuffled around doing fuck-knew-what. They’d both protested his leaving, and he’d left anyway. “You’re heartless,” Meis had said. “You’re killing us. We’re going to die of loneliness.”

“Entertain each other,” Gueira had said, adorably grumpy in the morning. Lio slept right through it, but he heard their voices and opened his eyes a crack.

Meis stroked his hair gently. Lio tried not to feel self-conscious. It was one thing to wake up with the worst bedhead in his own apartment, quite another to be seen with that atrocity by someone as effortlessly fucking gorgeous as Meis.

“You’re gorgeous,” Meis told him, when Lio aired his complaint. “Don’t even think about arguing with me.” He raised a hand to pet at Lio’s hair. Lio’s ears went pink. There was something unspeakably wonderful about Meis’s desire to touch him. Not even his parents had that, and Meis didn’t ever seem to have had enough.

“Am not,” Lio mumbled automatically, but kept his eyes wide open and trained on Meis’s face.

“Are,” Meis replied, tucking back a curl of hair. And then, “Oh. Lio.”

“What?” Lio asked. Meis was stroking the edge of his ear, and Lio wanted to shiver with how good that felt. “What is it.”

Meis giggled. “You’re on fire, sweetheart.” He held his hand in front of Lio’s eyes. Green fire clung to his fingers like paint, lively and oddly angular. “This is yours.” And then, before Lio could stop him, he was yelling for Gueira to come look.

Gueira was more amused than anything. “It’s adorable,” he agreed, cupping Lio’s jaw. Lio leaned into it hopefully, and then saw the orange fire in Gueira’s hand.

“How do I _stop,_ ” Lio wailed. Sure he’d wanted his fire back for real, but not as a dead giveaway of every emotion he kept having around them.

“You keep blushing,” Meis observed. “I think that isn’t helping your case.”

“You think?” Gueira asked, staring at Lio’s chest. Lio looked down reluctantly, only to find pink sparks dancing over his easily flushed skin.

“Beautiful,” Meis answered. Lio went red and then regretted it instantly.

His fire came back in flashes. Their affection brought it out most strongly, and his own embarrassment about how much he gave away and how easily.

What was more surprising and precious than his fire, though, was their utter lack of fear. Once, in the midst of a winter flu, Lio had skipped the suppressants. Kray had refused to touch him for days afterwards, suspicious of being burnt and angry at Lio for daring to go off of them and risk hurting someone.

When Meis saw Lio’s fire, he reached for it every time. Even simply to touch it, or hold Lio’s wrist as flames curled and sang around his fingers. Gueira was the same, lighting himself up as well just to touch Lio with burning hands. If there was an opposite to loneliness, it was burning with someone else, being touched by the fire that bound them together. Meis’s sweet violet sparks sinking into Lio’s skin, Gueira’s hot blue flames along Lio’s spine.

He couldn’t shake the thought that he’d burn white one day, so hot he hurt them. But neither of them seemed to care, though they held them when he confessed his fear. “Your fire is a gift,” Gueira said gravely.

“Even gifts can bring pain,” Lio replied sadly.

“But not this one,” Meis cut in. “Not to us.”

**—/—/—**

**epilogue**

They all liked trekking, which was a good thing, because Gueira didn’t think he could have stood it if both Lio and Meis began whining at the same time. Lio had ridiculously potent puppy eyes, and Meis was just plain annoying.

“Where are we going?” Meis asked, patience exhausted, about two hours in.

“We’re almost there,” Gueira sighed.

Lio took yet another photo of a plant. He’d discovered his phone could take photos about seven months ago and hadn’t stopped since. They kept walking.

Along the way, they talked idly about whatever came to mind. Meis’s mentorship of a Burnish girl Lio had worked with almost a year back, how she was coming along, Gueira’s tentative plans to expand the shop, Lio’s less tentative forays into Burnish advocacy. But those were well-worn topics, often reiterated, and were quickly exhausted by the pace Gueira kept them walking at.

Then Lio said, “Lake.”

“Yes,” Gueira said. Smiled at the transparent wonder on Lio’s face, caught Meis’s eye because he’d seen the same thing.

For all that Meis could be headstrong and abrasively direct and sometimes annoying, Gueira had never regretted choosing him. Meis understood people with the same deep passion he put into everything else he loved, and was often frustrated by their inability to take his insights in the spirit they were meant.

And he’d known since the first moment he’d wanted Lio that Meis wanted him too. Their tastes went hand in hand when it came to people, and it wasn’t the first time they’d added someone to their bed. It _was_ the first time it had been with the purpose of permanency, but Gueira had never had cause to think they’d regret it. And Lio was so wonderfully easy to love, beautiful and fierce and intelligent and brave— 

Even when he’d been scared, it had been _for_ them and not of them. He gave himself away freely and looked frightened whenever he received anything substantial in turn and they couldn’t not have wanted to keep him if they tried.

While Lio stripped off his pants to put his legs in the water, and Gueira circled the shore for interesting pebbles, Meis stayed behind to make sandwiches.

Or so Gueira thought, anyway. When he turned around, fifty feet off, Lio was doing his level best to drag Meis into the water with him. Meis’s sense of adventure kept him at home unless he was dragged out—at which point he enjoyed long walks and not much else—but Gueira somehow didn’t doubt that Lio would succeed.

He did, but only for about two feet before Meis refused to move further. Gueira walked back, taking out his phone to snap photos. Lio’s hands on Meis’s wrists, trying to pull him in, Meis’s stubborn pout, Lio’s easy brilliant smile. He didn’t like photos of himself but they’d make this entire ordeal worth it to Meis and preserve that sweet sunshine expression in Gueira’s camera roll, and it was for all this that he’d dragged them this far out.

Gueira couldn’t stop smiling as he clicked pictures.

Lio noticed what he was doing first, and pointed Meis's attention to Gueira as well. He grinned and waved at them with his free hand and they waved back, so beautiful and fitting next to each other that his heart tripped. “Join us!” Lio shouted to him, sending a flare of bright candy-colored fire skimming over the water. Steam hissed up in its wake, and Gueira leaned down to catch it. Lio's fire felt satiny in his hand, rushing up his palm into his chest only to burst, crackling, inside his ribs.

Gueira laughed, and sent back a flare of his own.

**Author's Note:**

> i've been staring at this fic so long i kinda hate it lol but also like. the ending of promare rlly got me ??? bc can you IMAGINE the huge fucking trauma of basing your entire life around leading your people to safety and protecting them and then having all of that purpose and everything that ties you to them in a tangible, visible way just. ripped out of you. and then being told you're okay now ??? and that hurts me too much to think about directly so this fic is really just a way of exploring that entire trauma but. in reverse. 
> 
> comments welcome! i am on [twitter](https://twitter.com/pareidole)


End file.
